No. of Recommendations: 5
Things get strident here. Time to take a brief break to hear a story about Abe Lincoln, as reported by Garrison Keillor and inspired by his visit to a New York library:
I don’t see anybody haul a reference book off the shelves; Google has rendered half the library obsolete. I came here to look up a woman charged with murder whom Abraham Lincoln defended in Peoria, a case a friend of mine said she’d heard of. I asked a librarian at the main desk and she said, “You’d have to go to a law library in Illinois for that.” But I googled it on my phone: “Lincoln murder trial Peoria” and there it was.
The woman, Melissa Goings, was 70, married to an abusive man who was trying to strangle her when she grabbed a stick of firewood and hit him and killed him. Lincoln took the case before an all-male jury and asked the judge to let him consult with his client. They went to an office below the courtroom and she escaped out a window and never was seen again. Lincoln told the judge: “I didn’t chase her off. She asked me where she could get a glass of water and I said, ‘There’s mighty fine water in Tennessee.’” The indictment was dismissed.
